In late November and early December the IIRE will again organize an international three-week school for socialist activists. This 'Ecosocialist school' is a unique opportunity for activists to come together, learn, exchange experiences and build networks. To facilitate participation, we keep costs as low as possible and, if necessary, help fund travel costs for activists from the Global South. For this year's school, we already have applications from several European countries, the U.S., Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Argentina, Algeria, Indonesia and Mexico.
‘De kapo is verantwoordelijk voor de werkprestatie van de gevangenen, hij voorkomt sabotage en zorgt ervoor dat alles ordelijk en schoon is. Als soldaat zal het u aanspreken. Wanneer we niet meer tevreden zijn, is hij kapo af en slaapt hij weer bij zijn mannen. Hij weet dat hij de eerste nacht door hen zal worden doodgeslagen,’ aldus Heinrich Himmler, leider van de SS, in 1944 tot zijn generaals.
This text was originally published in 1997 as a supplement to Rouge. Writing in response to The Black Book of Communism, Bensaïd discusses the Stalinist counter-revolution.i
In 1964 Herbert Marcuse asked in One-Dimensional Man whether it was still possible to ‘break the vicious circle of domination’.i In other words, he questioned whether revolution was still possible in developed capitalist countries, where ‘the pure form of domination’ had taken shape. The working class, now linked to the system of needs ‘but not to its negation’,ii seemed bound to lose all its subversive capacity in the ‘affluent society’.
Three defeats of the German revolution
I
On the occasion of the bicentenary celebrations of the Great French Revolution of 1789, there was an intense public controversy in France, Great Britain and the United States about the alleged ‘excessive costs’ of this revolution.i The conquest of human rights, so far, so good. But what about the deaths caused by the Terror and those of the Vendée uprisings?
At the end of the Second World War, the revolutionary movement faced an unexpected situation.i The bureaucratic Soviet regime had not only survived the war, but appeared to be expanding in Eastern Europe. Capitalism, out of breath in the 1930s, seemed to be regaining strength.
As a motto to the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon quotes Marx: ‘In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead.’ The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.i Hence, a descent to roots and a return to the source are not the solution. The existence of a black civilisation that disappeared in the 15th century does not grant black people ‘a badge of humanity’: ‘I am not a man of any past.
